KickApps Integrating Community Features with Joomla

I saw the website last night and I thought it was cool but the question was "What is that all about"? When you mentioned it's a possible competitor to CB, then I understand the implications. I took one look at CB and ditched it. Joomlapolis was good but outdated. So KickApps has great potential. Thanks for the one sentence explaination.

Hey Steve,

Thanks for pointing this out. Very interesting. However, I would like to see a more thorough review of this product. I can see a lot of benefit in going this route for building your community, but at first glance, I can also see some setbacks.

For one thing, CB is truly integrated into Joomla!. Your content is on your site and not in some widget that pulls content from the KickApps server. I'm curious if that might have an adverse effect on SEO. Also, with CB, you have full access to the source code, so you can customize it until you are satisfied. With KickApps, you have some great tools, but you are limited by what they make available to you.

Overall, I would say KickApps seems to be a great solution for anyone wanting this type of functionality, but I would not go as far as to say it is a viable alternative to CB in all cases.

Thanks again for sharing this. I will definitely have to look into it further.

Right Corry! I thought about these kinds of solutions few months ago when I discovered them (they are quite a bunch of them, pretty smartly done), but I came to the same point that what about the control we all have, cherish and have enjoyed with Joomla & extensions.
This made me think about the sense to be given to 'Open source matters' as time is going, Joomla and its brothers evolving, maturing, and... becoming less open than ever.

I had to smile when I heard few months ago that Google was entitled to develop it's own Wiki.Sadly smile of course.
When will it be the time for Joomla, Drupal, and consors, considering that eZ Publish have made the
move far beyond, even if the core is OS, what doesn't prevent it to take a foot in the Big Industry.

There are more and more folks in the 'Techies-innovators-VCs' that are probably reviewing scenarii of such a TAKE OVER!

Believe me, it will come sooner than you can imagine for a simple reason: THE MORE Joomla, Drupal and consors are going to be powerful containers, the quicker the move will be.

Would you bet for that?

Saw Trainingforwarriers.com The widgets seem to take forever to load.. While the widgets themselves may be good looking and cool to play with.. It doesn't make sense to use kickapps.. if it takes forver to load..!! doesn't it??

there is also a good social networking template on http://www.anthonyurso.com they also have a chat program like facebook

Wow, so close!

I really needed a program like this and it came so close but it's missing some critical features.

As for as I can tell, photos are not put in user defined albums. This is critical and makes it unworkable for me. A model would set up "Head shots", "Glamour Shots" and "Family" sticking photos in the correct albums. Here they'd just go in any which way. On my site, artists make an album for each series of drawings. Having them pile all the art together makes it too messy and disorganized. Other issues: No BBS code, no slideshow and no minithumbs under albums. Also, although the profile seemed comprehensive - it was also unattractive.

Too bad, it was the closest so far.

I dropped in on the site yesterday... and I was sold immediately on the intuitiveness and ease of customizing my own widgets. I am building a media site to host all sorts of content related to things you find in urban communities. I was very excited because I could see how this product would quickly advance my work. Then comes the big let down. Dealing with storing content on servers outside of my domain. Also, I'd much rather buy the program and launch it locally. When are companies going to realize that eventually customers are going to get tired of giving access to their bank account to pay a subscription. Great package... but I just cannot pull the trigger.